3D Printing Speeds

I am hoping someone has some experience here in the professional level 3D Printer area.

I frustratingly cannot get quantitative data for printing speeds on the Stratasys Fortus FDM machine. I want to compare the build time to the 3D Systems 3500 ProJet system which I have a quote from the sales rep to be 5 hours per inch of Z height. The 6000 series from 3D had about a 2 hour/Z inch modelling rate. But thats another level higher in cost.....blah blah

So to get apples to apples, I will of course need to consider the volume of the part in an FDM machine, a smaller part could be magnitudes faster. BUt again, I have nothing in which to base a real numbers comparison. Seems like there should be a cc/minute volumetric deposition rate stated and all manufacturers could use that relative number to compare apples and apples.

Any experience out there? I'm looking at the Fortus 250, but more so the 400mc from Stratasys, and the 3500 from 3D Systems.
Thanks
Scott

if you are seriously considering buying one, send the reps the stl and have them time it. a couple of bucks worth of filament and some time would be worth it for them if it sells a machine.

another option would be to call some 3d printing bureaus with these machines and ask them. they could give you pretty good estimate of the time.

Done, getting feedback from the reps now. Hoping to confirm with some real world users that I trust on here.....

SCP said:

Done, getting feedback from the reps now. Hoping to confirm with some real world users that I trust on here.....

Click to expand...

I have a Stratasys uPrintSE and the build times will seem very slow, especially if you have a complex parts or many parts as I usually do in my runs. My machine prints in 0.010 inch layers, but the finish product has been outstanding. I can go down to about 0.030 wall thickness with good strong results.

Here area couple examples of actual build times:

Very large single part: 7.513 cu. in. material, 4.193 cu. in. support = 9 Hours 23 Mins
Multiple small parts: 2.63 cu. in. material, 2.22 cu. in. support = 8 Hours 48 Mins

So you can see a lot of variables to make coming up with a real good number is very hard.

For me, I setup a build, start it, do other things, return take parts out, repeat cycle.